“I can’t wait to not be writing this book anymore.” -Me, to my husband yesterday

I spent so much time this month being a good little ML and writing articles about NaNoWriMo that I didn’t actually write a single post about my own personal NaNo journey which is odd. Usually I can’t shut up about how my novel is going and I bombard you with little potato updates all month but I guess it’s a testament to how freaking busy I was that I never had the chance. This month zooooomed by so fast, it’s insane.

If you’ve been watching the little widget at the top of the blog, you know that I passed 50,000 words on Sunday, November 27th. But keeping in mind my firm belief in finishing the novel not just hitting 50k, I still powered through the last four chapters finally finishing the book tonight in our area’s online write-in. Now, my novel is actually MUCH longer than the just shy of 55,000 words I finished the month out with both because I started early and for other reasons I’ll cover in another post so my feelings at the end of this NaNo are mixed. Continue Reading »

There isn’t much time left in National Novel Writing Month and you’ve found yourself behind on your quest for 50,000 words. You’ve got to write a whole lot of words in a very short time. How are you going to make up the deficit especially when you feel completely stuck?

There’s a lot of advice for last minute “cheats” but most of it is just designed to pad your count and isn’t actually helpful to your novel as a whole. For instance, in No Plot? No Problem! Chris Baty recommends cheats such as having your characters spout long quotations from books (which, of course, you’d just have to delete later) or always referring to your character by their very long, full name (Dr. Edward Robert Smith-Jones Esquire the third) which you’d only have to undo in editing. But there are a whole bunch of ways to get your word count up fast that will actually help your novel in the long run even if they are a little… unconventional. Continue Reading »

I have a lot of music. I used to listen to the radio just about 24/7 but now we live next to this big hill that prevents us from getting a radio signal (seriously, it’s really annoying). Working from home, alone, I really need to listen to music at all times in order to properly function. I download indie artists I’ve never heard of when they offer their albums for free. I download the free songs on Amazon. I ripped every CD in this house to MP3 (and we have a TON). I’m not picky. I just like music.

I do  listen to internet radio a lot as well. But I can only hear the same commercials on Pandora and Yahoo Radio in a row before I want to kill people. Also, there are many times during the day when I cannot spare the bandwidth for internet radio because I’m doing something  online that needs it all.

But, as I’m sure is a common issue for the iPod generation, I started to run into a problem with how to listen to all this. See, I’m one of those people that obsessively listens to their favorite song of the minute  over and over and over again and, while this makes me happy, it meant that I really didn’t listen to most of my song collection. I enjoy the random thrill of a song I used to love in high school popping into the playlist between my new favorites but true random shuffle wasn’t working for me because it was repeating songs and also giving me stuff like Christmas music that I don’t want to hear year round. I also felt like there were some songs I never ever heard.

It took me several years of tweaking, but I finally found a way to play my music to my satisfaction.  Continue Reading »